Presentation by Mattia Santoro, CNR-IIA, Italy GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of System) is presented and its main constituent services and components are described. The FAIR principles appliance in GEOSS is analyzed. On-going and future developments are also introduced.

1. How FAIR is GEOSS
S. Nativi (1), J. Van Bemmelen (2), M. Santoro (1), G. Colangeli (2)
O. Ochiai (3), P. De Salvo (3)
(1) Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research,
National Research Council of Italy
(2) European Space Agency
(3) GEO Secretariat
BlueBRIDGE Workshop
3 April, 2017

2. GEO AND GEOSS
Group on Earth Observation and Global Earth Observation system
of systems

3. GEO AND GEOSS
Group on Earth Observation and Global Earth Observation system
of systems

4. GEO AND GEOSS
Group on Earth Observation and Global Earth Observation system
of systems

5. Global Earth Observation System of
Systems (GEOSS)
Together, the GEO community is creating a Global Earth
Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).
Earth observations from diverse sources, including satellite,
airborne, in-situ platforms, and citizen observatories, when
integrated together, provide powerful tools for understanding the
past and present conditions of Earth systems, as well as the
interplay between them.
GEOSS aims to better integrate observing systems and share data
by connecting existing infrastructures.
There are more than 200 million open data resources in GEOSS
from more than 150 national and regional providers such as NASA
and ESA; international organizations such as WMO and the
commercial sector such as Digital Globe.

6. IMPLEMENTING GEOSS
GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI)

7. GEOSS Applications
GEOSS Providers
GEOSS Application
Developers
(intermediate Users)
GEOSS
end-Users
GEOSS Applications
GEOSS ApplicationsGEOSS Applications
Enterprise
System j
… .
Enterprise
System 1
System
4Enterprise
System 3
Enterprise
System 2
… .
… .
… .
SBA 1 SBA 2
SBA 8
Enterpris
e System
K
Enterprise
System 3
System
4
Enterpris
e System
1
Enterprise
System 2 Enterprise
System Z
Enterprise
System 1
System
4Enterprise
System 2
Enterprise
System 3
GEOSS Portal
DOWNSTREAM
UPSTREAM
MIDSTREAM
GEOSS Common Infrastructure
APIs
Mediation modules

8. Societal Benefit Areas
Data Providers
> 200 million data resources
spanning all SBAs
GCI
M2M
Registration
GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI)

9. Enhanced GEOSS Portal - Overview
• Enhanced during 2016
• Accessible from www.geoportal.org
• Coordinated with ESA, CNR-IIA, DG-RTD, DG-JRC and
GeoSec
• Focus on engagement, delivery and advocating
• Structured in 3 phases
• 1st phase – 2016: interface restyling: completed
• 2nd phase – 2017/18: deployment of major upgrades
• 3rd phase – 2019 onwards – operations and evolutions

10. GEO Discovery and Access Broker (DAB)
GEO DAB is a brokering framework that interconnects hundreds
of heterogeneous and autonomous supply systems (the enterprise
systems constituting the GEO metasystem) by providing mediation,
harmonization and transformation capabilities.

11. GEOSS FAIRNESS
How GEOSS addresses FAIR Principles

12. FINDABLE
How GEOSS addresses FAIR Principles

13. Discovery in GEOSS
• GEOSS has to deal with the large amount of datasets
provided by the end systems, e.g. millions of (small to
medium size) products, and long EO time/space
series.
• GEOSS has to collect metadata (at least for
harvested catalogs) and provide effective
discoverability.

14. Adopted Solutions
• Dealing with such numbers, normally constrained
queries commonly match a large number of datasets.
• GCI addresses this challenge by returning a smaller
and/or an ordered result sets.
Views
Ranking and Paging

15. Ranking and Paging
No-SQL DB
Good performances on
large stores
No preliminary constraint
on data structure
Need to preliminarily
index queryable elements GEO DAB Internal
Metadata Model
Pre-calculated in batch,
based on:
Metadata Quality
Accessibility
Etc.
Calculated on-the-fly,
based on:
Query Constraints
Applied to scores
(configurable)

16. GEOSS View
• Definition:
– Subset of the whole GEOSS resources defined by applying,
via the DAB, a set of clauses
• Discovery clauses (e.g. spatial envelope, keywords,
sources, etc.)
• Access clauses (e.g. data format, access protocol, CRS,
etc.)
– Defined “View” exposed on the GEOSS Portal
Consumer-defined View – i.e. Client-side These
views are available only for the client application which
defined the view.
Provider-defined View –i.e. Server-side These
views are available for all client applications.

17. ACCESSIBLE
How GEOSS addresses FAIR Principles

18. Accessibility in GEOSS
• In GEOSS, main Access related challenges include:
– Visualization of data previews
• provide a fast preview service allowing users
quickly to evaluate discovered data before
deciding the download.
– Basic Transformations
• provide users with an easy (i.e. transparent)
access to the discovered data along with a set
of basic data transformations to make them
more easily processed

19. Accessibility in GEOSS - Visualization
• GEO DAB provides a fast preview service allowing to get data preview:
– Metadata record is augmented by adding a reference to data preview;
preview tiles at different zoom levels are generated in a batch mode.
– To store and retrieve single tiles in an efficient way, GEO DAB utilizes
a NoSQL key-value DB.
– When available, GEO DAB utilizes data provider fast preview services
by implementing the required mediation.
• GEOSS Portal uses allows Users to quickly evaluate discovered data
before deciding the download.

20. Accessibility in GEOSS – Basic
Transformations
• In an environment such as GEOSS, no matter which
technique is implemented there will always be cases
in which the required processing is consuming too
much time for a click-and-get pattern.
• The DAB + GEOSS Portal access transformation
allows to deliver discovered datasets according to a
common grid: format, Coordinate Reference System,
spatial and temporal extent and resolution.
• Where this transformation workflow requires a long
processing time, Users are allowed to opt for an
asynchronous version of the same services.

21. INTEROPERABLE
How GEOSS addresses FAIR Principles

22. Interoperability in GEOSS
More than 155 Brokered
Systems
About 200 M granules

23. Adopted Solutions – GEO DAB
• Introduction of a brokering tier (GEO DAB) dedicated
to mediation of service interfaces and metadata
models harmonization in a transparent way for both
users and data providers.
• The GEO DAB maps the diverse models onto its own
internal model, which is general enough to comprise
all the necessary concepts.
• The key features of the GEO DAB internal data and
metadata models are flexibility and extensibility
allowing adding new concepts and related attributes.
OGC CSW 2.0.2 AP ISO 1.0 INPE
OGC CSW 2.0.2 ebRIM EO CKAN
OGC CSW 2.0.2 ebRIM CIM DCAT
ESRI GEOPORTAL 10 GI-cat
OAI-PMH 2.0 ESRI GEOPORTAL 10
OpenSearch 1.1 NCML-OD
OpenSearch 1.1 ESIP BCODMO
OpenSearch GENESI DR NCML-CF
CKAN NetCDF-CF 1.4
CUAHSI HIS-Central FTP populated with supported metadata types
ESRI REST API 10.3 WAF Web Accessible Folders
OGC WCS GeoNetwork (2.2.0 or greater)
OGC WMS Ecological Markup Language2.1.1
OGC WFS 1.0.0, 1.1.0, 2.0.0 NERRS (National EstuarineResearch Reserve System)
OGC WMTS HMA CSW 2.0.2 ebRIM/CIM
OGC SOS 1.0.0, 2.0.0, 2.0.0 Hydro Profile HDF
OGC WPS 1.0.0 IADC DB (MySQL)
OGC CSW 2.0.0 Core GrADS-DS
OGC CSW 2.0.2 AP ISO 1.0 FedEO
OGC CSW 2.0.2 ebRIM/EO AP ARPA DB (based on Microsoft SQL)
OGC CSW 2.0.2 ebRIM/CIM AP ESRI Map Server
IRIS Station SHAPE files (FTP)
IRIS Event KISTERS Web - Environment ofCanada
HYRAX THREDDS SERVER 1.9 Environment Canada Hydrometric data (FTP)
OAI-PMH 2.0 - Harvesting OpenSearch 1.1
GBIF Earth Engine
DIF RASAQM
HYDRO EGASKRO
UNAVCO SITAD (Sistema Informativo TerritorialeAmbientaleDiffuso)
CDI 1.04, 1.3, 1.4 FileSystem
ISO19115-2 GDACS
THREDDS 1.0.1, 1.0.2 GeoRSS 2.0
THREDDS-NCISO 1.0.1, 1.0.2 Degree catalog service2.2
THREDDS-NCISO-PLUS 1.0.1, 1.0.2 OpenSearch GENESI DR

24. RE-USABLE
How GEOSS addresses FAIR Principles

25. Re-usability in GEOSS
• In GEOSS, challenges related to Re-usability mainly
stem from datasets heterogeneity.
• In addition, GEOSS needs to address the
requirement to support diverse (cross-)disciplinary
applications targeting different Communities and
User categories which have different needs, as for
data discovery and presentation in an informative and
significant way.

26. Adopted Solutions – GEOSS Portal
• User-centric, considering various user communities:
• GEO Flagships and Global initiatives
• ESA Thematic Exploitation Platforms
• SBA/Thematic Customization of search and results visualization:
– Satellite: includes smart filters for imagery (Landsat, Sentinel 2)
and SAR-type
(Sentinel 1) satellite data;
– Disater Resilience SBA: Earthquake events filters
• Focusing on providing resuable Portlets (for integration in external
Community Applications)

27. Adopted solutions – GEO DAB APIs
Different APIs for serving diverse Application development use cases (environments)
A set of standard Web service interfaces:
• e.g. OGC service interfaces, CKAN, OAI-PMH, FTP, etc.
A set of APIs for software developers:
• Client side APIs:
– (high-level) JavaScript library
– … . (Python)
• Server side APIs:
– REST/JSON APIs
– OpenSearch APIs
– … .
GEOSS Applications
GEOSS Application
Developers
(intermediate Users)
GEOSS
end-Users
GEOSS Applications
GEOSS ApplicationsGEOSS Applications
GEOSS Portal
DOWNSTREAM
MIDSTREAM
GEOSS Common Infrastructure
APIs
Mediation modules

28. Conclusions
• In the past 10 years GEOSS has developed a truly
Global and multidisciplinary System-of Systems
• A valuable framework to experiment and learn how to
deal Milti-disciplinary Interoperability challenges..
• The new GEOSS Portal + DAB platform signifcantly
improved the discoverability and accessibility of
sahred GEOSS resources, addressing more and
more User requirements.

29. Thank you